Blast From the Past
Treasure-hunting archeologist and Peabody resident Victor Mastone, 54, dives local waters searching for shipwrecks, sunken lighthouses, and even Babe Ruth's piano.
(Photograph by Erik Jacobs)
I'm thinking you must have read a lot of pirate stories when you were a kid.
No, but my father and I used to walk the beaches year-round, and he always wished we had a metal detector.
Ever find any loot?
Unfortunately, there's not much treasure on Revere Beach.
If I were to spend a day diving with you, what could I see?
There are all sorts of things out there. I'm working with a doctoral student who's studying a China trade vessel that sank off Cape Cod in the 1800s. Off Cohasset, you can see where the original Minot's Light blew into the ocean in 1851. And there's a canal near Hadley where you can see pilings that may have been mooring structures or parts of bridges.
What can we learn from ancient shipwrecks?
Ships are time capsules - they show us a moment in time. A lot of materials like plants, clothing, and paper are preserved better underwater than they are on land.
Your work is done through the state's Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources, which you head. But if you're out on your own, can you take whatever you find? There must be rules for this kind of thing.
The Commonwealth owns shipwrecks and other historic objects in state waters. You can dive and look wherever you want and recover things from sites that we've ruled aren't historically significant . . . but to recover something from a historically significant site, you need a permit. Once you remove objects from the water, they start to degrade and break apart, so we want to be very careful. We're reluctant to let people remove things if they can't conserve them.
There's a famous legend that Babe Ruth threw a piano into a Sudbury pond in 1918. Did you really go looking for it?
People used to think that finding it would break the curse of the Bambino. We identified some targets a few years ago and went out with divers to look for it. There was about 6 feet of sludge in the pond, and no one ever reached the bottom. But the permit is still valid, so we might try again.
You dive in Boston Harbor. It can't possibly be as nice as diving in, say, the Bahamas. What's the visibility down there? Ten or 20 feet on a good day. It's improved from when I started. Twenty years ago, not many people wanted to dive the Inner Harbor, but now you can actually see things.
No dead bodies, I hope.
was warned early on not to volunteer for body searches.
What's the most interesting thing you've seen underwater?
There are some Native American dugout canoes sunk in Lake Quinsigamond, near Worcester, that date back to the 1660s. They're very well preserved, and we're working with the Nipmuc Indians to conserve them. That's a real find - history, archaeology, and culture all in one spot.
